Network connectivity is reaching more and more into the physical world. This is potentially transformative – allowing every object and service in the world to talk to one other—and to their users—through any networked interface.

Trends are emerging at the hazy edges of the tech universe that hint at the future of computer interfaces, including computers without interfaces at all. Josh Clark show us how to prepare for that future now.

Presentation slides

Session description

Computers are increasingly being held in the hand rather than sitting atop lap or desk. We now have to consider how our products will work underneath a finger instead of a mouse cursor. Increasingly, too, those products are being delivered as native applications, capable of fully exploiting device capabilities. That has ramifications not only for the way those projects get built, but also how we structure the businesses that support them.
In this session, Michael Honey and Tim Riley answer the question “web or native?” from business, product design and development perspectives. They cover the current state of web technology on modern devices and compare it to what’s available through native development platforms. They’ll look at web, native and hybrid strategies successfully employed by Australian and international businesses, and share their own stories as mobile and web developers. Finally, they’ll offer practical guidance on picking a strategy for web or native development that best suits your needs — as either a developer or a client.
Tim and Michael are two of the partners behind Icelab, an Australian design and development studio. They’ve trod both the web and native paths through their client work, such as interactive touchscreens for museum exhibits, online photo galleries and mobile tour guides, and also their own projects, like Decaf Sucks, a coffee review community available on the web (optimised for both desktops and smartphones) and as a native iPhone app.

About Michael Honey

Michael founded Icelab after a career as creative director and later, interactive director in an agency environment. He has fifteen years’ experience in design for screen, print, video and exhibition spaces, and has expertise in writing, programming, direction and post-production. He is an experienced coder, with a particular interest in algorithmic animation and datavisualisation. He is also experienced in the development of diagrammatic animations for cultural, engineering, scientific and architectural clients.
Michael’s interests include architecture, urbanism, and the environment.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelhoney

About Tim Riley

Tim is a partner at Australian design and development studio Icelab, where he builds excellent web and mobile applications using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Cocoa, and occasionally out of popsicle sticks. On alternate days he runs Decaf Sucks, an online community for coffee reviews, and RentMonkey, which contains the greatest on the Internet.
Tim is an active participant in the Australian web and iOS communities, as a regular speaker at the Sydney Ruby on Rails meetings, organiser of the Canberra Ruby Crew, and part of the Canberra Cocoaheads chapter. Tim loves coffee and hates gluten.
Follow Tim on Twitter: "
["post_title"]=>
string(76) "Michael Honey & Tim Riley - Web or native? Smart choices for smartphone apps"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(446) "

Session description

Learn how to build great looking and high performance mobile web applications leveraging CSS3 animations and Backbone.js, along with some cool use cases for geolocation and localStorage.
This session will describe in length a boilerplate you can use for developing your own apps aimed at A grade mobile devices and tablets.

About Julio Cesar Ody

Julio has been a full-stack software developer for the 12 years of his career, and during this time he went from being a GNU/Linux and Unix sysadmin, to a VoIP PBX architect, and finally a software developer.
Since moving to Australia from Brazil, he has worked on startups and companies building software and at the same time, stuck his nose as much as he can into the human side of the software equation, understanding developer productivity, how software companies work, and product development.
More recently he grew too interested in design for his own good, and began freelancing under the codename of Awesome By Design, writing a bunch of software which he open sourced on GitHub, giving presentations using his own presentation framework, and building software that not only does the job, but does so in style.
Follow Julio on Twitter: @julio_ody"
["post_title"]=>
string(61) "Julio Cesar Ody - CSS3 and Backbone.js for killer mobile apps"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(294) "

This session will describe in length a boilerplate you can use for developing your own apps aimed at A grade mobile devices and tablets.

Presentation slides

Session description

No longer is being connected limited to the constraints of the traditional desktop environment. Devices, networks and the Web are maturing and evolving at a fast rate. Our expectations about what we want, how we want it and when we want it are more complex.
Designing experiences for web for the “desktop” environment is something many of us have been doing for a while. Toss in “mobile”, sprinkle that with some social integration, a native app or two and things suddenly start getting a bit more interesting. How do you approach designing experiences that span multiple platforms and devices, contexts and roles to meet the evolving needs of our audiences?

About Alex Young

Alex Young is co-founder of MOB, an R&D lab in Sydney. MOB create apps, multi-device platforms, Augmented Reality and Computer Vision solutions for customers as well as their own products that are used around the world. MOB is active in the AR standards community globally and work with businesses to provide them hands-on experience using emerging technologies to get a look ahead at what the impacts to their organisations and customers will be.
Prior to MOB, Alex spent 10 years heading up UX, Design and Development teams across Interactive TV, Web and Mobile, primarily in Telco-land.
Follow Alex on Twitter: @alexmyoung"
["post_title"]=>
string(37) "Alex Young - Multi-device, Multi-role"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(302) "

How do you approach designing experiences that span multiple platforms and devices, contexts and roles to meet the evolving needs of our audiences?

Presentation slides

Session description

Mozilla is dedicated to ensuring that competition and innovation thrive on the Internet. In the last decade we rescued the Web from a near-monopoly and restored competition to the browser market. Now the standards-based Web platform is evolving rapidly — mostly in a good direction — and is defeating some of its competitors, such as proprietary browser plugins. However, it faces fresh challenges, in particular, single-vendor platforms for mobile devices that are attracting application developers away from the Web platform. In this talk I will describe the work we’re doing to ensure that the standards-based Web wins again — developing new technologies, extending Web standards, and shipping great products on all kinds of devices. I’ll talk about the challenges we face and what people who care about competition and freedom can do to help.

About Robert O’Callahan

Robert O’Callahan has been trying to save the world by contributing to Mozilla since 1999. In 2005 he left a career in computer science research at IBM to move back to New Zealand and work full-time for Mozilla, building up an Auckland development office (which is hiring!). He works on the Gecko engine that powers Firefox, focusing on layout, rendering, and media. He manages the video and media team, but prefers coding."
["post_title"]=>
string(61) "Robert O’Callahan - The Open Web Platform in the mobile era"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(490) "

In this talk I will describe the work we’re doing to ensure that the standards-based Web wins again — developing new technologies, extending Web standards, and shipping great products on all kinds of devices. I’ll talk about the challenges we face and what people who care about competition and freedom can do to help.

Presentation slides

Session description

If this year is all about the mobile space maturing, then your web skills are where it’s at and a key player is PhoneGap, which supercharges your code and gets you into the app store(s).
We look at one small framework’s journey from birth at a 2 day hacking event to become the preeminent method for distributing packaged web apps on mobile devices. We will have a look at the all the goodies that PhoneGap provides, then peek inside and see how it integrates with the web stack. We will explore some of the pain points and work arounds. Then, we take a quick pass through the community and resources available. Finally, we finishing up with a look at where PhoneGap is going and explore the interesting places your web dev skills could take you in the next 12 months.

About Ben Birch

Ben is Senior UI Engineer and Beer Baron at Aconex in Melbourne. About 5 years ago a revelation turned him from back end programming to concentrate full time on client side development. At Aconex he brought the rigours of testing to javascript and css well before it was easy and along the way built a lightweight UI framework. The same framework now drives jQuery Mobile using pure javascript.
By day he builds enterprise tablet apps on PhoneGap and by night he contributes to several open source projects and changes nappies. He is slightly over excited by all the awesome technology and rapid pace of change in the web space and it’s open and collaborative buzz.
Ben has a wife, two small kids and hangs out at #melbjs and on GitHub.
Follow Ben on Twitter: @mobz"
["post_title"]=>
string(45) "Ben Birch - HTML5, PhoneGap and What’s Next"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(338) "

If this year is all about the mobile space maturing, then your web skills are where it’s at and a key player is PhoneGap, which supercharges your code and gets you into the app store(s).

Presentation slides

Session description

Let’s start with the assumption that computing and networking are as cheap to incorporate into product designs as plastic and aluminum. Anything can tweet, everything knows about everything. The cloud extends from smart speed bumps to exurban data systems, passing through us in the process. We’re basically there technologically today, and over the next [pick a date range] years, we’ll be there distribution-wise.
Here’s the issue: now that we have this power what do we do with it? Yes we can now watch the latest movies on our phones while ignoring the rest of the world (if you believe telco ads) and know more about peripheral acquaintances than you ever wanted. But, really, is that it? Is it Angry Birds all the way down?
Of course not. Every technology’s most profound social and cultural changes are invisible at the outset. Cheap information processing and networking technology is a brand new phenomenon, culturally speaking, and quickly changing the world in fundamental ways. Designers align the capabilities of a technology with people’s lives, so it is designers who have the power and responsibility to think about what this means.
This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large.

About Mike Kuniavsky

Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centered design of digital products.
Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikekuniavsky"
["post_title"]=>
string(68) "Mike Kuniavsky - Design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computing"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(393) "

This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large.

Presentation slides

Coming soon.

Session description

Many web designers and developers are motivated to create accessible sites because more people can use the site, more people can find the site, and more devices can access the site. As we migrate to HTML5 and CSS to develop applications, we further the opportunity to create far more inclusive results, no matter the preferences of your audience and no matter why they have those preferences: are they driving? riding in a bumpy bus? accessing content in the sun? or might they be blind?
In this session, Wendy Chisholm, co-editor of WCAG 1.0, author of Universal Design for Web Applications, and one of the leading experts in accessibility and universal access helps you understand the challenges to and solutions for creating accessible apps with web technologies. Wendy will cover WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), accessibility and HTML5, as well as some common accessibility pitfalls when designing and developing applications, particularly on mobile and tablet devices.

About the presneters

Wendy Chrisholm

In this session, Wendy Chisholm, co-editor of WCAG 1.0, author of Universal Design for Web Applications, and one of the leading experts in accessibility and universal access helps you understand the challenges to and solutions for creating accessible apps with web technologies. Wendy will cover WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), accessibility and HTML5, as well as some common accessibility pitfalls when designing and developing applications, particularly on mobile and tablet devices.Wendy Chisholm is an author, activist and developer. She co-wrote “Universal Design for Web Applications” with Matt May (O’Reilly, 2008), and before that co-edited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0–the basis of most web accessibility policies. She has focused on inclusive web design since 1995. Being both a developer (B.S. in Computer Science) and a Human Factors Engineer (M.S. in Industrial Engineering/Human Factors), Wendy bridges communication between developers and designers. As a staff for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 6 years, she helped synchronize work on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with developments in internationalization and mobile design.

She is currently a Senior Strategist at Microsoft, where she works to make all web-related applications throughout the company accessible.

Her personal mission is to find elegant solutions that remove barriers that prevent everyone from participating fully in society. "I am an advocate for people with disabilities, people who are injured (especially vets) and people who are aging (i.e., all of us). I want to make inclusion a reality–both online and off".

Charles Pritchard

Charles Pritchard has founded several startups during his fifteen years as a web developer. A web standards advocate and an early adoptee of HTML5, he has produced several canvas implementations enabling web applications to run on a wide variety of virtual machines. His current focus is on creating and maintaining accessible applications as a critical component of software quality.
"
["post_title"]=>
string(75) "Wendy Chisholm & Charles Pritchard - Universal Access: now for apps as well"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(645) "

In this session, Wendy Chisholm will help you understand the challenges to and solutions for creating accessible apps with web technologies. Wendy will cover WAI-ARIA, accessibility and HTML5, as well as some common accessibility pitfalls when designing and developing applications, particularly on mobile and tablet devices.

Presentation slides

Session description

There’s little hotter in the world of web development right now than creating optimized web experiences and applications for mobile web enabled devices like iPhone, Android, iPad and webOS. Luckily, there’s a number of excellent HTML/​CSS/​Javascript frameworks to help developers create native-​​like experiences for these devices.
In this session, Jonathan Stark takes an in depth look at several of these, including JQTouch, JQuery Mobile and SenchaTouch, comparing and contrasting their approaches, and most appropriate uses. As a developer looking to tailor experiences and applications for the mobile web, this will be an invaluable session.

About Jonathan Stark

Jonathan Stark is a mobile and web application consultant who the Wall Street Journal has called an expert on publishing desktop data to the web. He is the author of O’Reilly’s Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is a tech editor for both php|architect and Advisor magazines, and is often quoted in the media on internet and mobile lifestyle trends.
Jonathan began his programming career more than 20 years ago on a Tandy TRS-80 and still thinks Zork was a sweet game.
Follow Jonathan on Twitter:@jonathanstark"
["post_title"]=>
string(49) "Jonathan Stark - The mobile frameworks landscape "
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(481) "

In this session, Jonathan Stark takes an in depth look at several mobile frameworks, including JQTouch, JQuery Mobile and SenchaTouch, comparing and contrasting their approaches, and most appropriate uses. As a developer looking to tailor experiences and applications for the mobile web, this will be an invaluable session.

Presentation slides

Session description

Building a mobile app isn’t easy. Regardless of chosen platform or technology creating a memorable mobile experience has some pretty intense challenges throughout. However if you can get it right it can have some incredible rewards and propel your brand in more ways than one. After spending ten years building mobile apps for some of the biggest companies in the world, author and mobile designer Brian Fling shares his six rules for building amazing apps that will either you get you started or improve upon your next release.

About Brian Fling

Brian Fling is an authority in the field of in mobile user experience and designing for multiple contexts. He has worked with hundreds of businesses from early stage start-ups to Fortune 50 companies to leverage a variety of mediums, like mobile devices, to design for the needs and context of real people.
Author of O’Reilly Media’s Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps, Brian goes in depth into the design principles involved in creating compelling mobile experiences for this new era of multiple devices and context. As well as explore the rapidly growing area of how to easily design and build a mobile site and web app, how to deal with devices practically and how to translate an experience to a variety of mobile devices.
Brian is a frequent author and speaker on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience, teaching people how to leverage mobile all over the world. Brian is also the founder and president of pinch/zoom, a design and development agency specializing on mobile experiences helping clients like Best Buy, Lonely Planet and others dive into the world of mobile.
Follow Brian on Twitter:@fling"
["post_title"]=>
string(56) "Brian Fling - Six rules to designing amazing mobile apps"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(406) "

After spending ten years building mobile apps for some of the biggest companies in the world, author and mobile designer Brian Fling shares his six rules for building amazing apps that will either you get you started or improve upon your next release.

Presentation slides

Session description

This keynote will focus on the unique potential offered to web developers — the ability to use the web platform to build compelling applications that reach across different devices, scenarios and environments. In discussing the approaches necessary to deliver great experiences across all these spaces, we will also uncover unique opportunities in a platform that reaches from mobile phones to the biggest display screen in your house.

About Chris WIlson

Chris Wilson is a Developer Advocate at Google Inc. He began working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-authored the original Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the first mass-market WWW browser. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on the AIRMosaic web browser for SPRY, Inc., he joined Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995.
Over the course of 15 years, Chris represented Microsoft in many standards working groups, in particular helping develop standards for Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through the W3C working groups. He also developed the first implementation of Cascading Style Sheets in Internet Explorer – the first, in fact, in any mass-market web browser. Beginning in 2001, he spent a few years working on the WPF project, but rejoined the IE team in 2004 to lead the IE Platform and Security team, then moved to work on the Javascript engine team in 2009.
In 2010, Chris left Microsoft and joined Google’s Developer Relations team, and is currently working on the Google TV project.
In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and daughter, and scuba diving in the cool waters of Puget Sound. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog.
Follow Chris on Twitter:@cwilso"
["post_title"]=>
string(53) "Chris Wilson - Keynote: The Convergence of All Things"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(594) "

This keynote will focus on the unique potential offered to web developers — the ability to use the web platform to build compelling applications that reach across different devices, scenarios and environments. In discussing the approaches necessary to deliver great experiences across all these spaces, we will also uncover unique opportunities in a platform that reaches from mobile phones to the biggest display screen in your house.

Presentation slides

Session description

Developers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges.
Ross Boucher, one of the developers of Objective-J, the Cappuccino web application framework, the visual development tool Atlas, and 280 slides knows a thing or two about testing sophisticated applications developed using web technologies. In this session, he’ll share some of those secretes, and help you better test and debug your applications.

About Ross Boucher

Ross Boucher is co-founder of 280 North, the organization behind 280 slides and the popular Cappuccino and Atlas frameworks. At 280 North, he splits his time between server and client-side code, including the text system in 280 Slides. He has a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Apple on the iTunes Store. His team was responsible for music recommendations, charting, and search. Ross is currently working with his colleagues to create tools that will help everyone build rich applications.
Follow Ross on Twitter:@boucher"
["post_title"]=>
string(63) "Ross Boucher - Quality Control: Testing and debugging your apps"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(578) "

Developers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges.

Presentation slides

Session description

Most user experience research takes place sitting behind a computer. And yet these days, most networked experiences are happening on mobile devices. Some common user experience research methods work well in a mobile environment — others don’t. In this talk, Juliette Melton will guide you through how to use some great existing research methods in a mobile context, how to incorporate some new (and fun!) methods into your arsenal, and propose next generation tools and services to make mobile user experience research even better.

About Juliette Melton

Juliette has ten years of experience building, managing, and researching digital environments and is a human factors researcher based at IDEO in San Francisco. She’s deeply interested in the intersections between digital culture, learning, and communication. Her work has spanned a broad range of industries including social media, casual gaming, education administration, electronic publishing, corporate banking, computer hardware, and public health.
Community education — through workshops, lectures, and writing — is an important part of her work. Remote user experience methods, agile project management, and research program planning are frequent topics.
Juliette holds an MEd from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She also has a BA in Comparative Literature from Haverford College.
Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j"
["post_title"]=>
string(49) "Juliette Melton - Mobile User Experience Research"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(424) "

In this talk, Juliette Melton will guide you through how to use some great existing research methods in a mobile context, how to incorporate some new (and fun!) methods into your arsenal, and propose next generation tools and services to make mobile user experience research even better.

Network connectivity is reaching more and more into the physical world. This is potentially transformative – allowing every object and service in the world to talk to one other—and to their users—through any networked interface.

Like what you see? Want a piece of the action next time around? Then get along to Web Directions South in Sydney October 24 and 25 2013.

Note: apologies for the sound quality in the first 11 mins of this video: it does get better!

Trends are emerging at the hazy edges of the tech universe that hint at the future of computer interfaces, including computers without interfaces at all. Josh Clark show us how to prepare for that future now.

Like what you see? Want a piece of the action next time around? Then get along to Web Directions South in Sydney October 24 and 25 2013.

In this talk I will describe the work we’re doing to ensure that the standards-based Web wins again — developing new technologies, extending Web standards, and shipping great products on all kinds of devices. I’ll talk about the challenges we face and what people who care about competition and freedom can do to help.

This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large.

In this session, Wendy Chisholm will help you understand the challenges to and solutions for creating accessible apps with web technologies. Wendy will cover WAI-ARIA, accessibility and HTML5, as well as some common accessibility pitfalls when designing and developing applications, particularly on mobile and tablet devices.

In this session, Jonathan Stark takes an in depth look at several mobile frameworks, including JQTouch, JQuery Mobile and SenchaTouch, comparing and contrasting their approaches, and most appropriate uses. As a developer looking to tailor experiences and applications for the mobile web, this will be an invaluable session.

After spending ten years building mobile apps for some of the biggest companies in the world, author and mobile designer Brian Fling shares his six rules for building amazing apps that will either you get you started or improve upon your next release.

This keynote will focus on the unique potential offered to web developers — the ability to use the web platform to build compelling applications that reach across different devices, scenarios and environments. In discussing the approaches necessary to deliver great experiences across all these spaces, we will also uncover unique opportunities in a platform that reaches from mobile phones to the biggest display screen in your house.

Developers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges.

In this talk, Juliette Melton will guide you through how to use some great existing research methods in a mobile context, how to incorporate some new (and fun!) methods into your arsenal, and propose next generation tools and services to make mobile user experience research even better.

About

The people and thoughts behind Web Directions

Founded in Australia in 2004, by long time web industry figures John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin, (and now run by John), Web Directions conferences bring together the web industry’s leading experts from around the world to educate and inspire our attendees.